Henry Fuckit is my alter ego and The Life of Henry Fuckit is a fictionalised autobiography. As I was writing the first draft it frequently struck me that many of the scenes amd incidents in the book might make excellent material for a graphic artist. Increasingly, I began to see the story not only as text but as a series of images. I started to look for an illustrator who I could afford, and I was fortunate enough to find Dan Riding.

I accepted that he wouldn't be prepared to read the whole manuscript, so I made 50 rough sketches and attached a relevant section of text to each. To my surprise, he soon developed a feel for the subject and was able to fashion a consistent style of representation.

The next step in the process leading to the realisation of the Minds-I-Book concept proved to be a radical mind shift. Instead of reading a narrative with images to enhance the text, why not try it the other way round? Why not look at the pictures, get a feel for the story, and then go to the text for confirmation and enrichment? But, I then thought, was this really so radical? Wasn't this how most people read a comic or graphic novel - pictures first, then the words?

No, what I had stumbled on was something different. It was the prominence being shifted from the writer to the illustrator in order to arrive at a richer experience of the story. Illustrator? What if there were many illustrators? Each would be influenced by the others, and the collaboration would become an organic entity with a life of its own. It would be constantly evolving as more and more people participated.

I understood with a sense of astonishment that this concept was only feasible because of the Internet. Without it such an act of collective creative collaboration would be impossible. It allowed the reader/viewer to experience a narrative on a higher level of aesthetic satisfaction, for they would now be able to participate in the construction of that narrative as it shifted and grew before their eyes - and in their mind.